Strathearn Snow Perthshire spirals down, curls inside this bleach bowl. On that flat strath floor, Earn’s eel sparkles black. Cottages shoal to Dunning as single ones are lost. Some fin up Ruthven’s elver burn. Hunch birds of prey wire up, never where they seem. © Beth McDonough Ed: “Strathearn Snow” first appeared in Raum 1(3), Read More
Get rid of words and meaning, and there is still poetry. Yang Wanli (1127-1206) Firstly, Newcastle University and Bloodaxe Books must be congratulated for instigating and publishing this innovative series of lectures. Quantum Poetics gathers three given by former Welsh National Poet Gwyneth Lewis. Though highly engaging and accessible, these are not for the dabbler. Read More
Published under the Faber New Poets initiative and funded by Arts Council England, this is Rachel Curzon’s first collection of published poems. The poet, born in Leeds in 1978, studied English at Oxford and now teaches at a boys’ school in Hampshire. She won the Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and her poems have been Read More
The Parting Glass is a collection of 14 sonnets by Northern Irish poet, Neil Young, long resident in Scotland. True to its title, each sonnet is a farewell to a beloved family member or a friend, a toast to memories – private and public, and a nod to the present that will soon be lost. Read More
In Staunin Ma Lane, Holton has selected classical Chinese poems from the 11th century BC to the 14th century AD, some of them well-known to generations of Chinese schoolchildren, for improvisation and translation into Scots, with English “glosses”. Holton states in his useful Afterword: “if you expect to find dictionary definitions of Chinese words in Read More
In her newest collection, Ghost of the Fisher Cat, Afric McGlinchey has taken poetry to another level. Here, her poems are sequenced into a novella-like arrangement, grouped into sections where she has allowed characters and relationships to develop “[…] across a time-space continuum […]”. The poet fits approximately ten poems of great variety into each Read More
Theresa Muñoz is well-kent on the Scots literary scene, being published in many fine journals; she writes for both the Scottish Review of Books and the Herald, and her publishing credits reflect a continuing presence in Canada. Close (HappenStance, 2012) introduced her work in pamphlet form; Settle is her first full collection. That title Read More
Ben Smith impresses his readership with colourful poems in his newest collection Sky Burials. His academic specialisation in Environmental Poetry is represented – playfully – throughout this entire collection. With this contradictory title, the poet does not only offer an oxymoron by endowing the sky with an earthly attribute, but also introduces a criticism of Read More
Nick Laird (Faber & Faber, 2015); pbk £10.99 Laird and I share the hometown of Cookstown, Co. Tyrone, right in the heart of Mid-Ulster. A busy market-town, it was relatively quiet during the Troubles, in comparison at least with the hotspots of Belfast and Derry/Londonderry. But it was not untouched. This common experience of growing Read More
This is an edited transcript and interview, recorded in May 2016 at the University of Dundee for DURA. The interview can be viewed by clicking on the image above. Beth McDonough: Good afternoon Brian Johnstone… it’s a pleasure to have you here. If I were to go through your CV, I think we would take Read More